Shaken
Inventing the Post-Enlightenment Religion Part 2
While playing with this topic I was struck again by an observation I have several times earlier made. Basically, there is a modern Post-Enlightenment religion, but we often don't recognize it as such: the modern American corporate environment. It isn't all that hard to hear some company name spoken in the reverent tones of someone trying not to anger the gods. Then there is the huge world of Corporate soothe-speak, with Psalms on "motivational" posters and coffee cups. Visit most HR departments and you'll find many of the most indoctrinated, as they are the front line for proselytizing. I among many tend to seek my own solace amongst the anti-prophets (Douglas Adams, Scott Adams, Demotivations, Mike Judge). I could go through my notes on how this culture fulfills all of the typical requirements of a religion, but I'll save that as an exercise to the reader.
Well, I've been distracted by Wikipedia and lost my original train of thought...
Inventing the Post-Enlightenment Polytheistic Religion
I'll take a break on the story discussion for a brief interlude on the system that I've been playing with for a lark these past few weeks. I've been taking Intro to World Religions and reinvolved in extra-curricular religion-based sci-fi works. I've been thinking about what values a post-enlightenment polytheistic religion might take on, and how it might relate to its dieties. Think about it, I'm taking nominations for "god promotions" (great thinkers, mostly), and I'll write an indepth look into the weird exercise I've put into this thought experiment. (Keep in mind that Enlightenment values are in some way anti-religious, rightly often ignoring and always sceptical of the supernatural, so I've been thinking about revolving things around Pragmatism and the ripple effect...)
Not much of a point, but fun and possibly useful for some fictional work...
Soap Opera, Shakespeare and Synthetic World Drama
I've caught several American soap operas in the past few weeks. I can't tell you which ones, or even what was going on, but I was struck by some fascination with the mechanisms of the Soap Opera. First of all, I'm something of a Spanish (Univision) Soap Opera guy: I generally don't watch them for the plots, merely for the pretty women on them. (Completely off topic: Spanish Soap Operas have the cliche that all of the women are rather well endowed in the chest department, with often the sole exception being the often "villain", due to what I assume is the simple matter of fact that the lesser endowed women need to make up for it with acting talent which then stereotypes them into the one actual role that requires some acting talent, albeit the ability to act mad, angry, vicious, and ultimately someone with an inferiority complex due to a smaller breast size...) There are a couple of not-quite-but-almost Soap Operas I do pay attention to the plot, however. (Smallville and Veronica Mars, should I catch it randomly.)
So I was trying to unwind bits and pieces of the plot. As a casual observer, this is a tough thing, particularly as I came in the middle of both episodes and realize that the shows I was watching could have nearly a half-century of back-story. It is much easier to watch shot composition, which is interesting in that all soap operas seem to have a long list of shot rules, including a too heavy use of the close-up. (This transcends the genre, apparently, as the Spanish Soap Operas look almost the same shot for shot.)
The idea I struck on was that if Shakespeare was writing for the audiences of the Television era (which, to ...
The Django Framework Architecture
One of the issues that people that are new to Django struggle with is in trying to get the feel for the framework from an MVC standpoint (the FAQ entry on this). Django does follow much of the good design principles that architecture frameworks like MVC were designed to promote, but doesn't follow the strict MVC pattern. The strict MVC pattern doesn't apply very well to web development, particularly because its circular control/feedback flow doesn't work as well in a stateless environment such as HTTP. (These strong ties between the three components of MVC is a fairly big flaw in MVC architecture, in my opinion at least.)
Perhaps a better view of the Django Framework exists in reframing it from the point of view of the PCMEF Framework (Maciaszek, Liong). PCMEF uses a hierarchy of layers that are looser coupled than MVC components. In brief these are Presentation, Control, Mediator, Entity, and Foundation. Django actually fits within these tiers reasonably well and appears to follow most of the PCMEF principles. (It may be interesting to research if following them even more closely might benefit Django.)
Presentation
The Presentation subsystem handles human-computer interactions. In Django this is the template engine and template loaders which take the information and present (often via HTML) to the user. The URL Configuration system is also a part of the Presentation layer. The Presentation Layer then depends on the Control subsystem.
Control
The Control subsystem is the program/application logic. In Django these are the Views and Manipulators. Django's Views are often confused with MVC's Views, as they are a part of the Control logic and don't perform Presentation logic (instead "upwardly notifying" to the Presentation layer). For Django this term makes sense, as the most often control logic ...
Book of the Moment: Lord of Light
Lord of Light follows Anansi Boys follows the final two/thirds of the Sprawl Trilogy (Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), in what has admittedly been a "mythic" kick, albeit my tastes have often wavered across this stretch of the literary horizon (particularly if you count the sometimes mythic voice in even Asimov's "hard" science fiction works, such as his Robots works). Lord of Light is intriguing for its resonance with one of my own unfinished projects (entirely different takes and different mythology but similarities in some technological aspects).
Lord of Light is one of Zelazny's pre-Amber science-fiction works. Zelazny started as a fantastical sci-fi author (which Gibson is one of many more modern authors in that tradition). Lord of Light is a great example of such. It takes very fantastical elements (in this case molded off of Hindu culture and religion) and wraps them around theoretical technological underpinnings. Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy had elements of this as Voodoo culture was a mold for AI systems' interactions with humanity. Wright's Trilogy was a neat re-Greco-fication of society, converting post-singularity humanity into a wild form of Greek elements. I have Nick Sagan's works on my to-read shelf, which are supposedly great works in this vein as well. Then its fun to contrast this with the works of true fantasy mythic writers like Gaiman. Gaiman has such an intriguing way with mythic structures that makes them new and modern even without the technological underpinnings of the fantastical sci-fi. His works often have you questioning if his supernatural creations might actually be out there waiting for you to bump into them.
Design Flaws in Modern MMOs
I visited the Auto Assault beta a couple weekends ago and was disappointed. I was hoping for something different from the norm, but was surprised at how much it was the same. It reminded me of a couple of design flaws that continue to irritate me when I test/play current MMOs.
Patching and Asset Management
Game Software Design and Architecture has long had a stigma for being backward. Game Companies, working on Movie-like Budgets in Movie-like Timeframes tend to spend more time on Engine technologies than is strictly necessary. It would be like Hollywood reinventing the Camera and Sound Equipment for every film. There's few good practices shared from company to company, and few tool companies fighting for any sort of standards (Lith, Epic). Furthermore, they often lose sight of the good practices in the rest of the software development world due to a few special needs such as asset obfuscation (why give the game buyer easy access to most of the artwork, sounds, and music that go into it?).
One of the key pieces often left behind is Asset Management. Few game engines have any reasonable idea of which art assets are truly needed at any given moment. I figure that this is one of the major reasons for some extremely bloated memory foot-prints. It's also key to why these game engines don't seem to be able to load assets on the fly at any reasonable clip.
This comes into play in that most of the MMOs out there are using old school Patch Utils against big Mega-Files (large bundles, sometimes hundreds of MBs if not GBs, of asset files sometimes named with a funny/weird extension like .wad or .pig). This means that there is no per-asset versioning, patches aren't very atomic, and ...
